As digital signal processing technology increases in complexity and cost in applications such as cable modems, designers search for ways in which to reduce system cost while maintaining digital signal processing quality. For example, as Internet users demand more bandwidth, broad-band technologies, such as cable modem, and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) have responded by enabling increased processing rates in data receiving equipment.
However, increasing Internet connection bandwidth is not without a cost. As higher data rates are enabled in Internet equipment, such as cable modem receivers, complexity and cost can rise accordingly. As a result, designers continue to look for ways to cut costs without sacrificing digital signal quality.
Decimator devices are used in applications, such as cable modem receivers, to reduce the digital signal sampling rate of an input digital signal received from a cable-modem transmitter in order to enable further processing of the digital signal. In so doing, signal quality in decimator devices may be traded for system cost improvements.
However, current decimator device architectures have not enabled signal decimation to be easily scaled in order to achieve cost advantages. Furthermore, decimator devices have not been easily configurable, such that designers could easily adapt and port software between decimator devices. Scalability and adaptability are important when choosing digital signal processing devices, such as a decimator device, in order to enable reuse of software and hardware in subsequent generations of digital signal processing systems, such as cable-modem receivers.
In particular, scalable and portable decimator devices are important to cable-modem receiver designers in order to avoid having to rely on numerous decimator device architectures to achieve cost/quality targets among cable-modem designs. Relying on numerous decimator device solutions can result in increased development cost and time to market.